Apps in this Guide

No digital camera or amount of image editing can fix a bad photo. But if you see a good shot, the right camera and tools can help capture the image you want and share it with friends.

What canmore

No digital camera or amount of image editing can fix a bad photo. But if you see a good shot, the right camera and tools can help capture the image you want and share it with friends.

What can a camera app do?

Phone cameras can capture everything from candid selfies to scenic panoramas, 360-degree images, and brief-animation Live Photos in iOS. The stock Android and iOS camera apps are fine for everyday photography and offer a broad range of image-capture aids, from grid lines and timers to flash and HDR settings. If you want to doll up your images with stickers, filters, masks, or other overlays, look to apps such as Snapchat, which offer selfie filters and snowy animations. If you are feeling expansive, Google's Cardboard Camera lets you capture 360-degree VR photos with your phone.

What about organizing and storing photos?

You can store photos on your phone. But space on a device is precious. Cloud storage, on the other hand, is affordable -- often free -- and roomy. Apple offers 5GB of free cloud-based photo storage, for example, and Google, 15GB, with the option of purchasing more space. A good cloud storage service can automatically sync photos from your phone and provide editing tools for polishing up your images. Most cloud services will help you organize your images by date, or you can sort photos into folders or assign tags. A few use machine learning to identify faces, places, and things in an image to collect similar images together.

How do I share photos?

You can share your images with small groups of friends or go big and show off your best work to the general public. Snapchat and Instagram, for example, are designed for sharing moments with followers. Flickr and 500px, on the other hand, do a nice job of displaying photos to the public. Flickr, for example, will apply tags through image recognition, and you can tag your own images, allowing for tag-related searches.

How can I change the look of images?

To tune up the look of your image, grab a dedicated image-editing app. VSCO and Snapseed, for example, put professional-grade tools at your fingertips to crop, straighten, rotate, and tweak perspective, for example, or adjust color, brightness, and white balance. A few, such as Prisma), create near works of art.

Best mobile photo apps

Prisma

Photos for iOS

Apple's Photos provides a solid range of editing tools but shines in its ability to organize images. You can easily share your images, keep them safe on iCloud, or polish them up in the MacOS version of Photos.

Snapchat

Google Photos

Google's Photos app combines effortless backup with powerful, easy-to-use editing tools. And as you'd expect, locating photos is a snap through search, where you can hunt for images by person, location, item, or activity.

VSCO

To tune up the look of your image, VSCO put professional-grade tools at your fingertips, letting you crop, straighten, rotate, and tweak perspective of your image as well as adjust color, brightness, and white balance.

Instagram

Capture photos, polish them with editing tools and filters, and then share with friends on Instagram. The app has a Snapchat-like feature that lets you send private photos, videos, and messages to friends that disappear after they are viewed (the images, not the friends).

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Clifford Colby follows the Mac and Android markets for Download.com. He's been an editor at Peachpit Press and a handful of now-dead computer magazines, including MacWeek, MacUser, and Corporate Computing.